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Casual Surrealism

Michael Seidlinger was one of the first people to volunteer for the Twin Peaks Project. And judging from the excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Miseryhead, it’s easy to understand his enthusiasm. Much like in Twin Peaks itself, there’s a striking strangeness at work in the excerpt–a normal-ish high school setting is home to a “mannequin” toted around by the narrator, a principle who wears a suit of armor. There’s a delicate balance to be struck with this kind of casual surrealism. You don’t want to draw too much attention to it within the narrative, so it works away at the reader while he/she tries to focus on the goings on and more familiar logic of the frame story. It’s a balance Seidlinger, like Lynch in Twin Peaks, pulls off perfectly. The book should be out sometime in 2015, and I look forward to it. For now, we’ll have to be content to read Seidlinger’s excerpt at Everyday Genuis.